Personal information manager (PIM) applications generally provide access to email, calendar events, and contacts to users of personal computers. However, as a part of an enterprise-wide office suite installation, a PIM may provide a centralized portal to business information and processes including communications, events, people, documents, and other business data. Often, instead of locating documents and business data through a file system, a user will access a document or other data based upon its association with an item in a PIM, such as a document attached to an email message or a report linked to a calendar event.
Many items maintained by a PIM are also associated with a number of people in an organization, such as attendees of meetings or recipients of email messages. Realizing the identities of people associated with an item is frequently important to understanding the context of the item or appreciating its importance. In this regard, PIMs may present the people associated with an item as a list of names or email addresses. In a large organization that employs many diverse individuals, a user viewing such a list of names or email addresses in the PIM may not be able to make a cognitive link between a name or email address and the actual identity of the person. For example, a user viewing the name of a recipient for an email message may not recognize the recipient, either because the user knows the person by a different, familiar name, or because the name is spelled differently than it is pronounced. Further, for a user viewing a list of attendees to an upcoming meeting, a simple list of email addresses provides no personal context by which the user can recognize and address the other attendees of the meeting.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.